Wednesday, November 7, 2012 5:28 pm

No consequences

Some of the biggest names of political punditry spent the days leading up to yesterday predicting not just a Romney win, but a Romney landslide. Now they’re hoping you’ll forget that so that they can keep their overpaid sinecures (or, as they were called in “Blazing Saddles,” their phony-baloney jobs). But even though I seldom make predictions (more on which in a minute), I knew these people were full of crap, and I wanted to memorialize their fecal fullness so that perhaps voters, if not current and potential future employers, would have some idea just how seriously to take not only their powers of prognistication, which can fail anyone at any tmie, but also their grip on current reality, which, for most people, can be allowed little or no down time without serious consequences.

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough: “But my gut tells me there are two likely scenarios: (1) President Obama will squeak out a narrow Electoral College victory or (2) Mitt Romney will carry Ohio and be swept into office by a comfortable margin. After practicing politics for 20 years, I suppose I would rather be in Mitt Romney’s shoes than Barack Obama’s. Incumbents who are under 50 percent two weeks out usually go down to defeat.”

Addled GOP whore Karl Rove: ““In addition to the data, the anecdotal and intangible evidence–from crowd sizes to each side’s closing arguments–give the sense that the odds favor Mr. Romney. They do. My prediction: Sometime after the cock crows on the morning of Nov. 7, Mitt Romney will be declared America’s 45th president. Let’s call it 51%-48%, with Mr. Romney carrying at least 279 Electoral College votes, probably more.”

Addled Washington Post whore George Will: “George Will outlined a huge Romney Election Day in an interview on ABC’s ‘This Week,’ predicting a 321-217 landslide that included nearly every swing state including Minnesota.”

Toe-sucking whore (or sucker of whores’ toes; I can never keep that straight) and Faux News contributor Dick Morris: “Reasonable voters saw that the voice of hope and optimism and positivism was Romney while the president was only a nitpicking, quarrelsome, negative figure. The contrast does not work in Obama’s favor. His erosion began shortly after the conventions when Indiana (10 votes) and North Carolina (15) moved to Romney (in addition to the 179 votes that states that McCain carried cast this year). Then, in October, Obama lost the Southern swing states of Florida (29) and Virginia (13). He also lost Colorado (10), bringing his total to 255 votes.And now, he faces the erosion of the northern swing states: Ohio (18), New Hampshire (4) and Iowa (6). Only in the union-anchored state of Nevada (9) does Obama still cling to a lead. In the next few days, the battle will move to Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (15), Wisconsin (10) and Minnesota (16). Ahead in Pennsylvania, tied in Michigan and Wisconsin, and slightly behind in Minnesota, these new swing states look to be the battleground. … The most likely outcome [in the Senate]? Eight GOP takeaways and two giveaways for a net gain of six. A 53-47 Senate, just like we have now, only opposite. Barack Obama’s parting gift to the Democratic Party.”

Washington Examiner and Almanac of American Politics editor Michael Barone — the one guy among these clowns, in other words, who is even reputed to do actual reporting: “Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223. That sounds high for Romney. But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election. Fundamentals.”

Keep in mind, please, that the only reason these people have jobs is that they are supposed to know something about this stuff. (Not that I want their jobs, but I did better than all of them.) But the emperors have no clothes; their bare bums glistened this morning in the (here in Greensboro, anyway) bright autumn sun. They. Don’t. Know. Shit.

But you know who did? Nate Silver. The numbers guy. The nerd. The reporter. (He correctly called the Tea Party surge in 2010, too, in case you think he’s just a partisan who got lucky.) He stuck to his numbers even on his Twitter feed; this appears to have been the closest he ever came to gloating:

Note the time: 9:29 p.m. Eastern last night. Polls in a lot of states hadn’t even closed yet. And what had Nate done to that point? Only correctly predicted 30 states out of 30 that had been called to that point. More specifically, he had correctly predicted them in June.

Credit where due: Dean Chambers, the guy who ran the “Unskewed Polls” site, which a lot of Republicans were using before the election to try to convince themselves and others that Nate Silver’s poll sampling was overly weighted toward Democrats, told Business Insider today, “Nate Silver was right and I was wrong.” Not only that, he also called some other conservative pollsters out by name, particularly Scott Rasmussen, saying, “He has lost a lot of credibility as far as I’m concerned.”

In a fair and just society, political pundits who got things this [expletive] wrong would never be listened to again. When their names were mentioned, people would mutter embarrassedly and try to change the subject. If they ever tried again to appear on television or write a column about politics, people would point and laugh at their cluelessness until stuff came out their noses. Children would throw turds at them in the street and pin “Kick Me” signs to their backs. The sheer shame engendered by their own stupidity would trap them at home forever, dressed in the tattered rags of their reputations, wearing only one shoe and constantly revisiting the rotted ruins of a table laid with celebratory cake and Romney/Ryan How to Vote cards.

Upon reflection, and upon reminding myself that both of Obama’s victories have had as much to do with America’s evolving demographics as anything else, I’m inclined to go a little less harshly on these folks than is Sarah, but only for this reason: Sarah seems to think that the point of political pundits is to get things right. After a night and day of reflection, I’ve come to a slightly different conclusion, which is that their point isn’t to get things right, it’s to provide entertainment and psychological sustenance for the aging, dying cohort that is the Fox/GOP base right now. It’s about telling an audience what they want to hear, not what they need to know. And among the corporate entities that employ the above-named miscreants, Fox, at least, hasn’t always been completely dishonest about what it was trying to do.

‘NOTHER UPDATE: Besides Silver, two other people nailed this year’s EV count, although I don’t know as much about their methods as I do Silver’s (and I don’t know all that much about Silver’s except that it doesn’t involve his gut): Democratic strategist Chris Lehane and Josh Putnam, who professes political science at my alma mater, Davidson. (h/t commenter Scott Denham.) It’s worth clicking through to that chart and noting that of the prognosticators with a political affiliation, only one Democrat, CNBC’s Jim Cramer, scored worse than the best-scoring GOP pundit, Ross Douthat of the New York Times. Douthat predicted a 271-267 Obama victory and was the only one on his side to predict an Obama win at all.